Coaching exercises offer a powerful and effective way for you to add clarity and creativity to your sessions. These tools also provide structure that can help clients stay focused and help you feel more confident guiding conversations, especially if this is a new career path for you or you’re struggling with a challenging client.
Several life coaching exercises are available for you to learn — but you don’t need to master all of them. Instead, try a few of these tools and adapt them to make them your own.
Focusing on quality over quantity means you’ll have strong techniques to help clients accomplish their life-changing goals.
What are life coaching exercises?
Life coaching exercises are structured tools and activities life coaches use to help clients explore their thoughts and identify goals for personal transformation. They’re also used to help clients overcome mental blocks and motivate them to reach their goals.
You can use these coaching exercises during sessions to guide clients on their personal growth journeys. But they work well as mini-assignments or self-reflection prompts to keep clients on track between sessions.
These exercises are designed to support clients on their unique paths to reaching their goals. So they vary in style — some are visual, others reflective, and some more goal-oriented. You can choose which to use based on each client’s specific needs.
What do life coaching exercises do for clients?
These structured coaching tools help clients in a few ways, empowering them to set goals, understand themselves better, and stay committed to making positive changes in their lives. Let’s take a closer look at these benefits, so you can gain more insight into using coaching exercises to better serve your clients.
Turn abstract ideas into clear goals
Clients sometimes start out with vague or poorly defined goals based on general desires, like “I want more balance in my life” or “I want to be a better person.” Coaching exercises help them turn those desires into clearly defined, achievable goals.
For example, a client with a desire to have more balance in their life might set a goal to spend 30 minutes every day on self-care, such as meditating or taking a quiet walk. Or they might set a goal to spend quality time with loved ones for an hour a day.
Clear goals to work toward make coaching outcomes measurable and easier to track, setting clients up for success on their growth journey.
Increase client self-awareness
In order to build momentum and accomplish goals, clients need to develop self-awareness. Coaching tools like journaling prompts and visual frameworks help clients engage in deeper reflection and identify thought patterns or limiting beliefs that influence their choices and may be obstacles to self-improvement.
Becoming more self-aware on a deeper level and learning more about themselves helps clients understand how their goals relate to their personal values, providing them with encouragement to keep working on transformative change.
Build commitment and accountability
Clients may struggle to maintain motivation outside of sessions—and that’s common. It’s hard to stay focused on personal growth when life situations get in the way, obligations pile up, and schedules are packed.
So it doesn’t necessarily reflect on anything you’re doing or not doing during sessions or your abilities as a coach. But introducing coaching exercises is an effective way to help your clients focus again and stay motivated between sessions.
These life coaching tools give clients tangible steps to follow until the next session, keeping them engaged with the process. They also help you and your clients track their progress, encouraging them to stay committed and follow through on their goals.
Examples of life coaching exercises you can try with your clients
Some clients might respond better to visual exercises, while others find self-reflection more helpful, so let’s look at a range of life coaching exercises that fit different needs. It’s not an exhaustive list, but it can help you start exploring tools to incorporate into your coaching practice.
The Wheel of Life
This visual tool helps coaching clients evaluate their life satisfaction in different areas. It’s a wheel divided into several sections representing various aspects of life, such as career, health, and relationships. Clients assess how satisfied they are in each of these areas, giving them a visual idea of their life balance.
Clients can use the Wheel of Life to identify which areas of their lives are most important to them or which they’re most dissatisfied with. It’s a great tool to use during a first session with a client to go over different aspects of their life or work on establishing their goals.
Values identification
A key part of life coaching is helping clients identify their values, but it’s important to build alignment between what they want and why they want it. Knowing their values helps them set goals and maintain momentum to accomplish them.
Values identification exercises can help clients figure out what’s truly important to them, allowing them to uncover their core values. You can use different approaches for this, but a common one is having clients sort cards with values listed on them into categories. You could also have them make lists of words that represent what matters most to them.
Reflection prompts and coaching questions like “What makes life meaningful to you?” or “What would your perfect day look like?” are also helpful for identifying values.
Weekly goal setting
This is a simple, straightforward coaching exercise that adds structure to coaching sessions and reinforces consistency, encouraging clients to continue working on growth and change between sessions.
At the end of each session, you and your client come up with 1–3 small, actionable steps or goals for them to work toward during the week. When the next session starts, check in with your client to see how they did with reaching these goals.
Having weekly achievable goals to focus on helps prevent clients from getting impatient or discouraged. Each small goal they accomplish helps them realize that they’re making steady progress toward their overall goal.
Ideal day visualization
Many clients have a general idea of what they want to accomplish or how they want to change. But they might not know how to get there.
Guiding clients through imagining their ideal day helps them connect to their desires and values, motivating them to commit to change. This exercise can also help identify areas in a client’s life that aren’t in alignment with their values.
Ask clients to picture what a perfect day would look like, from morning to night. Have them describe what they’re doing during each part of the day, what they’re feeling, and what they’re experiencing via their senses to really immerse themselves in this exercise.
Future self journaling
Asking clients to visualize a successful outcome can be a powerful tool for motivation. Having them write a letter from the perspective of their future, successful self takes this one step further. This exercise encourages clients to imagine what achieving their goals will feel like, driving them to keep working toward that outcome.
Future self journaling helps clients build belief and confidence that they have what it takes to fulfill their goals. It also helps them develop an emotional commitment to change that can carry them through difficult times or periods when motivation is low.
How to gauge the effectiveness of life coaching exercises
Using coaching exercises doesn’t automatically guarantee effectiveness. So how can you tell if the ones you’re using are truly benefitting your client? You can estimate how well coaching tools are working by:
Checking in with the client’s energy
After doing a certain exercise, ask your client whether they feel energized or drained. Helpful coaching tools energize clients, helping them gain insight, clarity, or a sense of movement. These exercises can make clients feel confident about working on reaching their goals.
Coaching tools that aren’t effective for a client can make them feel drained. They might lose motivation or feel unclear about their values and goals. In this case, try adapting the exercise in question or trying out a few different ones to find a tool that’s helpful for your client.
Reflecting on client takeaways
Ask clients for input on what they’re thinking after doing a coaching exercise. What did they notice or learn from it? They might discover values they weren’t aware of, or they might gain other insights that help them with personal development.
This isn’t just for more complex coaching exercises. Even simple ones can end up leading clients to a breakthrough. Helpful tools have this effect, raising a client’s self-awareness and driving them to achieve their goals.
Adjusting based on style and needs
Not every coaching tool works for every client, and even an exercise that’s worked great for a client can become less helpful over time. It often depends on factors like their current situation and personal progress. For effective coaching, assess and adapt exercises over time as needed, or switch to another exercise if one isn’t working.
It all depends on what resonates with a client’s personality and goals. The pace that they’re moving through during the coaching process can also affect which exercises work best for them.
Start with simple tools that build coaching confidence
Life coaching exercises can help you create more focused and reflective sessions that encourage growth, even if you’re just getting started in this profession. Using effective tools can boost your confidence in your coaching skills and abilities, allowing you to expertly guide clients toward change.
The Jay Shetty Certification School helps coaches learn what tools to use to best serve clients—and how to apply them with heart, skill, and purpose. This helps ensure growth-oriented coaching sessions that lead clients to transform their lives.
Ready to begin learning effective coaching exercises? Join our program today.
